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Company Description: Founded in 2009, Okta is an independent provider of identity for the enterprise. It is headquartered in San Francisco as a publicly traded company and led by Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder, and Frederic Kerrest, COO and co-founder.

Okta enables organizations to both secure and manage their extended enterprise and transform their customers’ experiences. With more than 5,500 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta claims that its customers can easily and securely adopt the technologies they need to fulfill their missions.

Further reading

Markets: Okta’s key markets include North America, Europe and Australia. It provides identity management solutions for organizations across all industries, including government, financial, nonprofit, technology, retail and education.

International Operations: Okta has four offices in the United States; as well as offices in Canada, United Kingdom, France, Amsterdam, Sweden and Australia.

Product and Services

The Okta Identity Cloud offers Universal Directory, Lifecycle Management, Adaptive MFA and Single Sign-On and API Access Management as the main product lines. Okta also provides API Products and access to the Okta Integration Network.

Universal Directory: Deploys a flexible, cloud-based user store to customize and manage all users, groups and devices mastered in Okta or from any number of sources. It also provides integration to any app or directory with lifecycle awareness and extensibility.

Lifecycle Management: Automates user onboarding and offboarding with direct communication between directories and cloud applications for external and internal users. It provides more than 120 pre-integrated applications for provisioning and de-provisioning.

Adaptive MFA: Secures apps and VPN with a robust policy framework and a set of modern second-verification factors. It intelligently implements knowledge, possession, biometric and contextual factors to improve user experience and strengthen security.

Single Sign-On: With a single set of credentials, users are enabled to access enterprise apps in the cloud and on-prem, and on mobile devices. This is possible through Okta’s app integration wizard, which supports integration to any app or modern API.

API Access Management: With Okta’s identity-driven policy engine, IT administrators can easily configure access policies and authorization to API resources. It defines access based on user profile, groups, network, client and consent, and initiates instant updates to user permissions based on user profile and status.

API Products: Gives developers programmatic access to the Okta Identity Cloud, enabling them to embed Okta as the identity layer of their apps for CIAM or a custom use case. Developers can use Okta APIs and widgets, run scripts to modify user data and integrate with custom workflows for a stronger identity experience.

Okta Integration Network: Provides out-of-the-box integrations for more than 5,500 cloud, on-prem and mobile applications. Allows IT administrators to manage application SSO and the user lifecycle, including advanced onboarding and off-boarding and device and license management options.

Here are highlights from the lead Gartner Peer Insights review in Single-Sign-On, which is Okta’s largest business:

Overall Comment: “The experience with Okta has been good. Okta connects with our business on all levels. We align at the technical and implementation level with the Customer Management team, including our Customer Success representative. However, we also align at the executive level with our Okta executive sponsor that connects with our executive team on a regular cadence, ensuring that our partnership continues to grow.”

If you could start over, what would your organization do differently? “Our process was extensive and thorough. The entire process took 18 months. What we would do differently is look to shorten the process. When we began our search, there was very little information aligning and comparing External IAM (B2C) solutions. So we had to spend significant time talking to many vendors to ascertain if the technology could meet our needs. If the industry comparisons were available, we could have shortened our cycle by 6 months or so.

What one piece of advice would you give other prospective customers? “Okta has a variety of features and functionality, and they do a wonderful job selling the value. Contract for the services you need currently; however, ensure that you have a vision of your future needs and negotiate pricing for feature access to services with your initial contract. This industry moves fast, and you will need more services quickly; be prepared.

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IT Central Station has several product reviews. Here are highlights from one posted in May 2018:

Primary Use Case: “We use Okta for single sign-on (SSO) of multiple applications, access management, and multi-factor authentication (MFA).”

Improvements to My Organization: “Prior to implementing Okta for our environment, we had our users (15,000-plus) contact the Service Desk to reset their passwords if forgotten or they were locked out. Even though we had a self-service password reset solution in place, it was not user-friendly and effective. Particularly, in the case of a lockout, you could not log in to the computer to use the self-service solution and had no other option than to call the Service Desk team.

“However, once we implemented the self-service password reset (SSPR) through Okta, we directed the users to use it themselves and everyone found it easy. Also, Okta, being a cloud-based web solution, you can log in from anywhere, anytime with a device that has internet access. It became a simple process and, obviously, the number of calls to the Service Desk came down drastically, reducing our man-hours and cutting costs. This was a big money saver, which was much appreciated by our clients.”

Valuable Features: “The Single Sign-On and MFA features are most valuable.”

List of current customers: Okta supports more than 4,000 organizations, including 20th Century Fox, JetBlue, Nordstrom, Slack, Teach for America and Twilio. They trust Okta to securely connect their people and technology. Customer stories can be found here.

Resources

Chris J. Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor-in-Chief of eWEEK and responsible for all the publication's coverage. In his 13 years and more than 4,000 articles at eWEEK, he has distinguished himself in reporting...

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